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Jose Alberto Marchi, Playing With Fire

Featured Artist: Jose Alberto Marchi

Argentine artist and composer Jose Alberto Marchi transforms photographic images into paintings, this in turn, has inspired him to create video art. His works are Inspired by the 19th Century photographs of Thomas Eakins, the famous animated sequences of Eadweard Muybridge, and the films of Tarkovsky.

Some of his nudes are both positive and negative images, in others they materialize from the canvas the way a photo would from developer. Often muted in a fog, they have a ghostly ambiance of a nether region in a surreal world. A few almost appear to the eye as lightly penciled graphite drawings. His Sacrificio series was inspired by the final scene of Andrei Tarkovsky’s film The Sacrifice, in which the protagonist burns his house down to save the world. The late 19th century people from his previous paintings, now in new situations, are forced to react to a fire, the only color within the canvas.

“White is not the absence of color. It’s the fullness of light.

Silence is not the absence of sound. It is the presence of stillness.”